The first two weeks were unexpected: my son F seemed to sleep 20 hours a day and I was lulled into thinking that this parenthood gig wasn’t as tough as had been forewarned.

Then F woke up and joined the party.

The days of uninterrupted sleep had become a distant memory but I was intrigued at how F managed to sleep through seemingly loud noises. We had a loft conversion and the constant banging/sawing never woke him up. He would quite happily lie in the Moses basket and snooze through Star Wars and various war films.

A scour of the internet revealed that a mother’s womb is actually a pretty noisy place and background white noise can be rather comforting to a newborn “on the outside”. A seed was sown.

Now F was a pretty good sleeper (in part thanks to a soft toy called Dave – more of this later) and we smugly started to think we’d nailed it. Oh dear. From then on F would often wake up several times during the night.